Africa & Beyond

MAKE - FIX - HELP OTHERS

ABOUT

Juliana Rotich is a technologist, strategic advisor, entrepreneur, and keynote speaker. Juliana serves as an advisor to the councils of BASF, Risk Cooperative, Africa Technology Ventures (ATV) and the Lemelson Foundation. She is a trustee of Bankinter Foundation for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Spain, board member of Digital Impact Alliance and the Kenya Vision 2030 Delivery Board.

She is Co-founder of BRCK Inc, a hardware and services technology company based in Nairobi, Kenya. BRCK was formed to realize a vision for enabling communication in low infrastructure environments by developing useful, innovative, and exciting hardware-centered technologies in Kenya. She is a Director in the Kenyan entity BRCK Kenya Ltd and drives partnerships for tackling social problems through appropriate technology.

Juliana co-founded Ushahidi Inc., a non-profit tech company, which specializes in developing free and open source software for changing how information flows in the world. She was Executive Director from Jan 2011 to September 2015, strategically spearheading Ushahidi to be translated into over 30 languages, over 90,000 deployments and a 20 million populations reach. She was instrumental in increasing business development revenue and philanthropic capital into Ushahidi and its related initiatives like iHub. Before Ushahidi, she worked in the telecommunications and data warehousing industry with over 10 years of experience.

Her personal mission is to make things, fix problems and help others. Wherever technology can help to do these three things and accelerate progress, she enjoys figuring out that intersection and adding constructive value. She is a champion for internet connectivity and works to support entrepreneurs to scale their work and impact.

TALKS

What happens when barriers to innovation become drastically lower? - LIFT (2011)

WORK

BOARD MEMBER

Kenya Vision 2030 Delivery Board

Board Member
The Kenya Vision 2030 is the national long-term development policy that aims to transform Kenya into a newly industrializing, middle-income country providing a high quality of life to all its citizens by 2030 in a clean and secure environment. The Vision comprises of three key pillars: Economic; Social; and Political.

Gearbox

Board Member
Gearbox is an organization that creates a supportive ecosystem for hardware entrepreneurs, granting SMEs, startups and entrepreneurs. It provides access to tools that would typically be beyond their reach, thereby creating a pipeline of inventors and invention-based businesses by removing the key constraints to developing innovative hardware products in Kenya.

Bankinter

Board Member
The Mission of the Bankinter Innovation Foundation is to create sustainable wealth through innovation and entrepreneurship.

Since our founding in 2003, we have had form her vocation to be a groundbreaking model of contribution to society, dedicating our efforts to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, as engines of creation of sustainable wealth, among all the agents active of our society, from entrepreneurs and senior managers, entrepreneurs to those that will be in the future, students. fundacionbankinter.org/en/foundation

Ushahidi

Executive Director
Ushahidi Inc. is non-profit tech company that specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. ushahidi.com

ADVISORY BOARDS

Lemelson Foundation

Advisor
The Lemelson Foundation uses the power of invention to improve lives, by inspiring and enabling the next generation of inventors and invention-based enterprises to promote economic growth in the US, and social and economic progress for the poor in developing countries.

BRCK

Director
The BRCK is a rugged, cloud managed, full-featured router with built in failover and programmable GPIO expansion. BRCK can connect to the internet through RJ47, GSM, Wifi Bridge, as well as Ethernet Over USB via the GPIO Breakout. It’s rugged build and cloud managed interface make it ideal for “away teams”, monitoring systems in remote locations, and businesses with challenging infrastructure. brck.com

iHub

Trustee
Nairobi's Innovation Hub for the technology community is an open space for the technologists, investors, tech companies and hackers in the area. This space is a tech community facility with a focus on young entrepreneurs, web and mobile phone programmers, designers and researchers. ihub.co.ke

AWARDS

World Economic Forum Young Global Leader 2016

World Economic Forum Young Global Leader 2016
The Forum of Young Global Leaders is a unique and diverse community of the world’s most outstanding, next generation leaders. Bold, brave, action-oriented and entrepreneurial, these individuals commit a portion of their time to jointly shape a better future and thereby improve the state of the world.

Monte Carlo Woman of The Year 2016

Monte Carlo Woman of The Year Award 2016
Under The Honorary Presidency of HSH Princess Charlene of Monaco and Under the High PATRONAGE of HSH PRINCE ALBERT II, Juliana Rotich was honored for her work in Technology.

DLD

DLD Women Impact Award 2013
"We are proud to present this award to strong women who, using digital technologies, improve, enrich and even save people's lives by showing braveness and commitment," DLDwomen founder Steffi Czerny comments on the award, which was presented by Gabriele Zedlmayer, Vice President Global Social Innovation at Hewlett-Packard.

Social Entrepreneurship

Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2011 - Schwab Foundation World Economic Forum
Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2011 - Schwab Foundation World Economic Forum The next chapter for Africa requires us to look both at the tremendous opportunities for economic growth, and the challenges the continent faces in being able to tap into this growth.

Social entrepreneurs, and their innovations promoting inclusive economic growth, are critical to improving the state of the world, and therefore the work we do at the World Economic Forum. - Hilde Schwab schwabfound.org/content/juliana-rotich

FELLOWSHIPS

Desmond Tutu

MIT Media Lab

Director's Fellow
The fellows initiative is one way to open up the Lab up to the world, which will benefit both the fellows and the Lab community tremendously.

What all the fellows have in common is that they’re leaders in their fields, and that they embody the Lab's uniqueness, impact, and magic. -Joi Ito MIT Media Lab Director media.mit.edu/people/directors-fellows